archive

[cartman]

Hi,

Can someone please tell me the easiest way to do and archive of data on last day of the month.. and retain this archive until the follwing month...

Thanks,Cartman

 

[pstephen]

"Easiest way to do a backup" is a hard thing to define because it depends on your setup, but let me add a few comments that I hope will be helpful.



Running a scheduled archive on the last day of the month depends on the scheduler program that you are using. Most likely you are using TSMs Client Schedule instead of a third party scheduling program (like Maestro, orAutoSys or even cron). Unfortuantly, (as you are probably finding out) TSMs Client Schedule is not the most feature rich scheduler, and it is oriented towards a Weekly (not Monthy) backup cycle.



So what I do is set up a Archive job to start to run on the last weekend (Saturday or Sunday) of the current month then set the Period (PERUnits=) to 1 month.



The other aspects that you need to consider is defining the management class Archive Copy Group to have a retention of 1 month (31 days).

You also need to figure out what the Filespec is going to be for the Archive command. Do you want to backup everything on your Clients? Are there any files you want to exclude from the Archive? Are there multiple drives that you want to Archive? Answering these questions will help you create the Filespec that you will put in the Archive schedule OBJECTS field and in the incl/exclude list.



Sorry for the long post, but you may want to also consider doing monthy Selective backups instead of an archive (but I digress)....

 

[cartman]

so a selective backup once a month may be as good hmmm. What command do I use to create an archive ? . How much does it archive ... is it just the data from the server for that day that gets archived ? . Sorry for the "basic" questions but Im new to TSM.

Thanks, Cartman.

 

[pstephen]

You create an archve with the "archive" command. With the "archive" command you have to specify all the files that you want to have backed up on the command line or in the OBJECTS field on the server. Of course you can use wild cards and specify subdir=yes to get all subdirectories, but you are bascially specifying all the files to be backed up. Archive has the advantage of storing everything that you specify for a specific period of time (as defined in the Archive Copy Group). This is good for off-site tape rotations.



The Selective command also backups up the files that are specified on the command line or in the OBJECTS field, but has the advantage of also using the includes and excludes that you define for your regular incrementals. the Selective backups use the retention settings that are defind in the Backup Copy Group.



If your objective is to send a "snapshot" of a certain set of files off-site for a specific period of time, then the archive is probably the way to go. Hope this helps...